Behind the great career of the world’s best player Lionel Messi is father Jorge Messi. This is a character with a mediocre past, but created great success for his son. It is difficult to imagine the relationship between a metallurgical worker and such an outstanding representative.Jorge Messi is a father, a worker, a player representative and a player-related company executive who appeared on this planet to change the history of football. The lenses of the man nicknamed Peluca were quite strange and contradictory.

Before stepping in to manage the career of his son, the world’s best player Lionel Messi, he was just a worker with a small, insignificant dream, knowing nothing but his colleagues doing manual labor. working hard in the same shift, or sharing the same bus transporting workers to the factory.

Jorge is the son of Mr. Eusebio and Ms. Rosa Maria Pérez. His father was the one who taught him the bricklayer trade, but Jorge understood that if he wanted to achieve what he truly wanted, he had to study. Before becoming a chemical metallurgical technician, he worked for a medical institute and even worked as a screw maker at a metallurgical workshop.

He then applied for a job at the Acindar company headquartered in Villa Constitucion in the 1980s. In an interview with Argentine media, Jorge’s former colleague Daniel Angel Reche revealed details about the line. The time before the trip to Barcelona remains largely unknown.

“Jorge was in a very stressful state at that time,” Reche said about the father of the genius Messi – who at that time had to work alternating shifts of up to 12 hours, including Saturday and Sunday. The red helmet is closely associated with Jorge’s position as a quality control inspector at a metallurgical company.

That hat shows that Jorge has a higher status than his manual labor colleagues wearing white helmets, but inferior to the managers wearing blue and green helmets.

“We went from Rosario to Villa Constitucion,” Reche said: “Sometimes we went in my car, but most of the time we went by the company shuttle bus. I also took the bus on Avenida San Martin and Uriburu in Rosario. It usually takes us about 1 hour and 10 minutes to travel. Jorge is a humble person, very hardworking and a great companion.”

Those trips to work are regular and boring, but sometimes incidents happen. One day, the car carrying Jorge and the workers had an accident because it was raining, the road was slippery and the car was going fast. The car overturned, but fortunately Jorge only suffered minor injuries, and there were no casualties.

Jorge’s work at Acindar ended when Barcelona agreed to pay for Messi’s growth hormone disease treatment. The whole family agreed to move to Spain so that their son could have hope of pursuing a professional football career in Europe.

Initially, Jorge was just an inexperienced, inexperienced representative, but he already had the seeds of a great manager. He has been with Leo since he was a child, left everything behind to support his son at Barca and devised a structure to support Messi in becoming the best player in the world.

The Acindar metallurgical worker was wise enough to establish himself as a representative of the most attractive and under pressure player in the world. He is so invisible that not many people believe that Jorge is Leo’s agent and manager.

We never see Jorge, but he is always there. At Newell’s, at Barcelona, at PSG, at Inter Miami and of course with Argentina. He is not an important piece of the puzzle, but he is the one who balances the temperature so the engine doesn’t melt.

Jorge was not a businessman, but he did everything intuitively and did it well. He is not the owner of a family company, but of a multinational company. As Messi became a global brand, Jorge hired the best people in each field to study each proposal made every day. They help him create effective projects with Adidas, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Tourism, Hard Rock, Cirque du Soleil, Budweiser, Pepsi…

No one can argue that the credit belongs entirely to Messi, but the environment is the condition for success to occur and last long. With Jorge at the front line of the shield, he ordered the team to collaborate so that Messi could focus his mind on football and his life for as long as possible.

Jorge has established a business structure with perfectly prepared fields. This is the first firewall surrounding Messi. He was the first to negotiate with Joan Laporta and then PSG. He was also the one who negotiated with Inter Miami.

When sued by the Spanish Tax Authority in 2016, he told the court that the mistake was his. We understand that everything is beneficial for Messi, and he suffers the bitter part. Messi has never had to face anyone at the club or national team because he has Jorge to help him.

Avoiding turbulence is the main motivation that Jorge creates for his son. It is true that Messi was devoted to his mother Celia, but he knew that his father was the one who risked everything for him to have the fortune he has today. He left everything in Rosario, from family, work, friends and ignored people’s slaps just to let his children be safe.

The success of this father-son, agent-player relationship can ultimately be explained from something more fundamental, simpler. As journalist Guillem Balague once defined in Messi’s autobiography: “Both are equally discreet and reserved. They are truly like vegetables, like worms.”